Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid by Mollie Moran Page A

crumb left on my plate.
    As I wolfed it down like a woman possessed,
     MrOrchard narrowed his eyes like a cat and his pinched face took on a
     supercilious air.
    ‘You know, Mollie,’ he
     said, smiling imperiously and delicately placing his coffee cup back in the saucer,
     ‘we’re not common servants here. We don’t work for
     middle-class doctors or bank managers.’ At the mere mention of the middle
     classes he wrinkled his nose as if a dog had just come and defecated on the pavement of
     Cadogan Square and he’d trodden in it. ‘Places such as that just
     have a maid of all work. We are domestic servants to the gentry and you would do well to
     remember that.’
    ‘What’s Mr Stocks
     like?’ I asked, wiping my bread round the plate to get the last drips of egg
     off. So far he was just a shadowy mystery figure and I’d yet to even catch a
     glimpse of him.
    Mr Orchard’s face suddenly lit
     up.
    ‘Oh, Mr Stocks is a fine gentleman
     through and through,’ he gushed. ‘He has breeding and class we can
     never imagine. He is a most refined and educated man.’
    ‘But what’s he really
     like?’ I urged. ‘What’s he talk about?’
    Mr Orchard looked down at me through his
     wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘The butler hears nothing,’ he said through
     thin lips.
    As he wittered on I realized that, to him,
     Mr Stocks was a god and his role on earth was to serve him. He genuinely believed the
     upper classes were morally and culturally superior. It was so different in them days.
     Proper rules of behaviour were dictated by the upper class, who led society in
     understanding the rules of manners, such as table manners, appropriate ways to dress,
     the correct way tospeak, including the words to use and their
     pronunciation. Even the rules of courtship and marriage came from the upper class. The
     vast majority of people in powerful positions were privately educated members of the
     upper classes. They saw themselves as rulers and keepers of British culture, and were
     not to be challenged by those below them. This rigid social order was overwhelmingly
     accepted and rarely questioned.
    It certainly wasn’t here in the
     basement of Number 24 Cadogan Square. Mabel and Mr Orchard had it engrained in them so
     deep that if you cut them in two, Mr Stocks’s name would run through them.
    I said nothing and, heeding my
     mother’s advice, for once managed to ‘keep my trap
     shut’.
    Mr Stocks, as it later transpired, was
     indeed a nice old boy, a real gentleman, but in any case he didn’t intimidate
     me. Why should I have been intimidated? I wasn’t inferior to him. You may find
     it hard to believe that a fourteen-year-old scullery maid from the sticks would really
     not feel intimidated, but I genuinely didn’t. Maybe the blood that flowed in
     my veins was the same as feisty Granny Esther’s, but to me, humans are all
     just humans. Underneath the clothing, be it apron or double-breasted suit,
     we’re all just two legs, two arms, a head and a heart.
    As a scullery maid, I may have been at the
     opposite end of the social class to Mr Stocks and even five rungs below Mr Orchard, but
     we all still had the same bodily functions at the end of the day.
    You have to wonder. The intricacies, the
     work, the etiquette that surrounded this small, privileged enclave of London – it would
     seem preposterous today. Fourteenof us all there to serve two men, I
     ask you! The butler, the footman and the hallboy didn’t have that much to do
     in my opinion. They just hung about all day, cleaning silver and opening doors. In a
     way, the servants made work for each other. The housemaids had to clean our bedrooms,
     the staff ate most of the food that was cooked and we created most of the mess. In their
     own right, Mr Stocks and Captain Eric didn’t require much looking after, but
     what else did they have to do? They didn’t work, after all, and it was all
     about social standing. Looking back, of course, it